BILL GERTZ: General says China space weapons threat a major challenge.

Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, commander of the Colorado-based Space Command, said the space weapons deployed by China and Russia are “in some ways getting harder to fight.”

“We operate in a domain in which our opponents have built a suite of counterspace capabilities to hold our satellites at risk in all orbital regimes,” Gen. Whiting told the Space & Missile Defense Symposium in Alabama.

The four-star general singled out the Chinese Communist Party for what he called its “breathtaking pace of space and counterspace” weapons development.

Asked the most significant issue he faces as a commander, Gen. Whiting said: “I think the ongoing greatest challenge is just the speed at which China is moving to rapidly improve their space capabilities and the threat that that potentially poses.”

People’s Liberation Army space weapons now include a “robust suite” of arms and capabilities that can blind and deafen U.S. military forces by disrupting and destroying satellites, he said.

“These include direct descent [anti-satellite] missiles, ground-based lasers, jammers and maneuverable co-orbital ASATs and dual-use satellites like the SJ-21,” he said.

What the U.S. has — in SpaceX — is unmatched lift and satellite-manufacturing capacity. What nobody has yet is the means to deal with a possible Kessler syndrome resulting from orbital warfare.